It was odd, worrying, funny. Every evening, just after the news diary conference, our managing editor would disappear into the TV viewing room to get his fix on the serial that he described, apologetically, as “my unfortunate obsession”. It wouldn’t have seemed out of place in a commercial newspaper environment but this happened to be at UmAfrika, a newspaper supported by the Catholic church and, at that time, trying to provide serious, level-headed coverage of the 1994 elections in strife-torn KwaZulu-Natal. Obviously, the managing editor needed the escapist fantasy of his soapie to help him deal with the violence and rage that spilled across our pages.
Soapies exert an extraordinary fascination over their devoted audiences. You have to wonder whether TV fantasy is a substitute for all the social and family ties, now largely lost, that held primitive bands of humans together over our long evolution. There is something deeply, touchingly, alarmingly tribal about the 24-minute episodes that pour from the box daily. From teenagers to grannies, the country is gripped by the relationship problems of people who exist only in the minds of scriptwriters and yet echo, in the form of entertainment, all our human yearnings for love, possession, revenge, sin and salvation.
Gray Hofmeyer, executive producer of SABC3’s Isidingo, tells how a viewer wrote in to say that the scriptwriters should be told that a certain two characters in the series were in fact in love. How should they know? – they only write it; audiences live it. Hofmeyer admits that keeping tabs on the personal histories of each major character in the five-year-old series does become a problem sometimes, so to keep the momentum going, minor characters are introduced. Intruders from outside the tribe, as it were, heat-seeking missiles straying into the battle zone.
Egoli’s associate producer, Burgert Muller, describes how audiences really do imagine that soap is reality. After one 1996 episode on the M-Net series, in which something was said about a squatter camp suddenly mushrooming in Boksburg, property developers went hysterical. Estate agents rang up pleading for a correction – there was no squatter camp – and the show’s staff, suitably chastened, have learnt to be more circumspect with the news that never was. In fact, soapies like Egoli employ researchers, in addition to writers, to check their facts so that the national economy and body politic do not suffer a fatal blow from the afternoon’s episode.
It’s easy to be sniffy and superior about soapies. A rich vein of absurdity runs through the popular imagination. Yet, if Tolstoy were alive today, practising the great 19th Century tradition of narrative that wove individual fates into a huge social tapestry, he might well be writing soapies to keep the bucks rolling in. There is no beginning and no end to the tangled fabric of the typical soap opera, any more than there is to the limitless scope of War and Peace, and this tells us something about TV, and life, and everything.
Soapies are reality: the characters are so ordinary, they just have to be seen as true reflections of who we are. Soapies-R-Us. They create the imagined community in which we all live, hearkening back to the primal order (or disorder) of things. Families in conflict. Friends betraying each other. Incest. Violence in the cave and in the lounges of Sandton. Passion, deceit, loyalty. It’s not surprising, really, that South Africans have embraced their soapies in an era of great change and uncertainty, because if there is one thing we can cling to it is the continuity of human nature.
That’s a pretty good basis of appeal for any media product. Grab them by their hearts and their pockets will follow. Soap opera got its name from the detergent advertising that filled the slots between quick, heartfelt scenes in US radio drama during the Depression of the 1930s. By the sixties the genre had evolved into the global television phenomenon we know today, employing hordes of writers, producers, actors and marketers to feed the insatiable lust of the public for something ordinary, simply about themselves. Every commercial channel on earth churns out its quota of these formulaic stories.
Gray Hofmeyer believes that the standard of writing and directing in SA is world class. He bemoans the fact that good black writers are often attracted away to advertising copywriting by better pay and perks, leaving mainly white writers to formulate the daily trauma. Burgert Muller believes that local is lekker, the more so the better, as SA audiences are very open to topical, typical situation dramas. This is why both Egoli and Isidingo try to shoot as much as possible on location – to give the subject matter some air outside the studio.
If anything, our soapies are more anchored in current social reality than, say, the average American or British equivalent. Rape, HIV/Aids, traffic accidents and racism feature in local shows without any discernible adverse reaction from the majority of viewers. In fact, soapies help them to cope. Yet this is also why SA soapies do not travel well internationally (except in Africa) and why they are open to the charge of parochialism. Egoli, for instance, whose dialogue is 60 % Afrikaans and 40 % English, gave up the attempt to export itself to Africa due to the burden of translation.
It’s not parochialism, it’s focus, insist the writers and producers; and they have a point. North Atlantic soaps tend to avoid social specifics in order to be more marketable internationally. We have gone the other way, secure in the knowledge that the home audience wants to see universal myths tricked out in SA guises, not Eurocentric characters pretending to represent all of humanity.
Take any soapie on any day of the week and nothing is stinted in on the emotional roller-coaster experienced by the characters. They scheme, fight, love and suffer together – but above all they survive in the interwoven chaos of life. Reflecting this chaos is perhaps where SA soapies have come the furthest since the freeing-up of media in the early 1990s. Gray Hofmeyer, once a director of the very first soapie series, The Villagers, in the 1970s, contends that “everything has changed”.
“We were not even allowed to show blacks and whites in the same scenes,” he says of The Villagers. “Now, things have changed massively politically. When we started Isidingo we smacked straight into issues of racism, and since then we have dealt with a lot of stuff outside race and politics, such as domestic violence and rape, which would have been inconceivable in the old days.”
Getting a soap on air five days a week, for however long the series runs, is a gargantuan task that has its own impact on the stories. Shows must be written, acted and produced in lock-step with their flighting because there can’t be gaps in the schedule. It is an immense logistical problem – for many shows it involves producing an episode a day, in rain or shine, in sickness and in health, till the death of the show. What few viewers realise is that this treadmill of creativity actually has the effect of making the characters quite complex and realistic. The show goes on and on and the characters keep evolving, day by day, going from situation to situation as we all do in life.
Fate, it has been said, is the theology of the soapie. Fate is literally a production imperative, and it works like this. At Egoli, executive producer Franz Marx, regarded as one of the doyens of SA soapies, thinks through the total story line of the series and then parcels out the work to a team of six to eight experienced scriptwriters, most of them freelancers. They rotate the work, scripting the daily episodes which are then passed on to production to develop the casting, studio needs, locations, shoots, editing and compilation.
From this maze of details arises the gripping treatment, seemingly as if Fate itself had lent all the characters their true identities and destinies. It is an amazing transformation of an industrial production effort into a mythic format, yet somehow one that taps into the psyche of society. This is not to say that soapies are always believable, any more than Homer’s Odyssey is or ever was. One reviewer of an American soapie noted that in a single episode, a woman fell over the Iguazu Falls in Argentina, then gave birth to a bouncing baby, then lied and manipulated her way into the heart of the man she really loved.
If this is not everyday life, how come everyone thinks it is? A sleight of hand is at work in soapies, as it always is in fiction, allowing the viewer to identify with people who are realistic enough to be believable. This sleight of hand has been successfully exploited in edutainment serials like Soul City, which specifically pioneers health awareness amongst women and youth, with the strongest emphasis on HIV/Aids. The Soul City Series 1 was first broadcast in 1994 on SABC 1 and on nine radio stations in African languages, and by 2003 had mounted six TV series and won many awards.
Here is one local drama that really has travelled. The reach of this super-soapie is enormous, with more than 16 million South African viewers and audiences throughout Africa as well as in Latin America, the Caribbean and South East Asia. It receives sponsorship from Old Mutual and BP and donor funding from the Department of Health, the British development agency DFID, the European Union, Ireland Aid and the Royal Netherlands Embassy.
If resonance with common fate is what soapies are all about, Soul City would seem to have it all. Yet the pure soapies – those without obvious didactic intent – are still the greatest heartthrobs for viewers who crave a sense of belonging. Soapies are to the electronic age what oral tradition was to Homer and the novel was to Tolstoy: an elemental, even savage, connection with the blood in our collective veins.